Allie makes things (in India)

These are photos from my first trip outside of Bangalore back in September. Not a lot of story behind them, just my favorite images from driving through rural Karnataka.

I still regret that I didn’t a better photo of this. Those wooden frames with the spirals on them are covered in silk worm cocoons. Karnataka is one of India’s major centers of silk production, so it was cool to see where all of that yarn I use at work every day starts from. (Actually I’m pretty sure a lot of the silk we use at work isn’t local … but still.)

In January I spent a weekend in Goa, and we (meaning me and about fifteen other people of varying degrees of acquaintance) stayed right on the beach in woven grass huts.

When I woke up the the first morning, the sun coming through the spaces between the strips of grass was making incredible patterns everywhere. Once everyone else was up I spent a while trying to capture all of the variations in pattern, and I even realized you could photograph through the tiny holes almost like they were pinhole cameras–like the image above.

I am the kind of textiles nerd who saw all of this and immediately thought about what amazing inspiration it could be for a collection of prints.

This is the hall of mirrors in the Samode Palace in Rajasthan, once actually a palace but now a hotel. (Not one I stayed in, though.) Converting your hereditary palace into a luxury hotel seems to be the thing to do in North India if you’re a well-to-do family down on their luck.

We walked down a whitewashed back hallway in the hotel, stepped through a completely nondescript doorway and into this amazing room, two stories high with a surrounding balcony. All of the alcoves have candleholders as well, which must make the decorations even more incredible. Every wall of this huge space is covered in either mosaics of tiny mirrors or hand-painted murals.

During the wedding trip with my coworkers to Kerala, one of the artists revealed that he had rescued a baby squirrel and had been secretly bringing it to work every day. (I sadly missed this as I was in a semi-conscious state while trying to endure an overnight bus trip for the second night in a row–I flew to Delhi the day after the wedding.)

I have, until now, been confused about what the correct term for these animals was; with the stripes they look more like chipmunks to me and people use both names. But thanks to the internet, I can confirm that this is an Indian Three-Striped Palm Squirrel.

The baby squirrel pictured didn’t survive, but a friend is now raising a second abandoned baby squirrel. I appreciate the occasional fuzzy critter breaks he provides. (It helps cut down on my impulses to pet stray dogs, which is really a bad idea, and also my longing stares directed at the toy dogs that live in the fancy apartment complex down my street.)

While doing squirrel research, I also found a Hindu myth that says the palm squirrel’s stripes were made by Lord Rama’s fingers, in reward for his loyal service in bridge-building. I think some context is missing there, but I like this painting of the scene.

This is the only elephant I have ever seen in traffic (near Jaipur, I think). But I have also seen camels (including once a good dozen of them, fully decorated, being ridden down the street outside of a bar I was headed to), donkey and pony carts, and cows (of course).

Learning to cross the street in India definitely took practice (and a lot of courage). It is largely every man (and car and autorickshaw and motorcycle) for himself. The day I found myself in the midst of three amorphous lanes of traffic weaving between passing two-wheelers I realized maybe I had gotten a little too comfortable. Seeing my parents’ reactions to the traffic when they visited made me realize how used to the chaos I was. When I first arrived every car horn made me jump, and now I hardly register them. (A good thing, since they are nearly constant.)

I’m pretty sure I won’t be afraid of crossing busy streets in New York anymore.

Between Agra and Jaipur my parents and I spent a day in Ranthambore National Park, ostensibly the home of many tigers. We woke up really early (an ongoing theme of my northern India vacation) and rode around the park in a very bumpy jeep with an inadequate supply of blankets. No big cats to speak of, but lots of cool birds and two different species of deer, as well as some crocodiles and a coyote an Indian wolf (thanks, Ji). So I felt pretty satisfied. (If I had woken up at 5am two days in a row and still not seen any tigers, then I would probably have been cranky about it.) We also shared our jeep with Violet and Reg, the archetype of very English pensioners. I wish I could do a proper character sketch of the two, but suffice to say they were both exasperating and incredibly charming at once.

I uploaded a whole set of my favorite critter photos from the park.

While we were standing in the courtyard of the City Palace in Jaipur (just a few steps from the giant silver urns), an entire troop of monkeys started to climb out of windows in the upper wall and file around the perimeter.

I still haven’t gotten over the novelty of an entire continent’s worth of new indigenous animals. It always seems particularly strange to see monkeys outside of the context of a zoo.

I wish I could see a pangolin somewhere, but I think the chances of that are pretty slim. (Though an article in the newspaper a few months ago claimed they live in Bangalore! That seems near-impossible to me.)

One of the sad things about working as a designer is that I can’t really share what I’m making with other people. But these photographs of my work have been posted to my company’s website, so I feel comfortable sharing them on my website too.

The righthand one is something I would probably have made independently, but the lefthand one is a definite departure from my usual interests, being pink. And paisley. I still like it though.

I am definitely a much better jacquard designer than I was ten months ago. In the beginning I was frustrated and sure I would never get everything right, but in the last few months I have finally woven some fabrics that really felt finished. (And that I can actually imagine looking properly awesome in someone’s house.)

Before I moved to India I don’t think I was aware of how many different film industries there are here. Everyone’s heard of Bollywood (which is in Mumbai, for Hindi films), but many of the regional languages have their own movie industries too. (And most of them seem to have -ollywood nicknames …) Karnataka (the state where Bangalore is located) has “Sandalwood” for Kannada movies, and awesome silkscreened posters like this one are plastered all over the city every week to advertise the new releases. (There are regular photographic posters, too, but I love these much more.) Looking for the new posters every week is one of the rituals of my work commute.

Admittedly this is not actually a poster for a Kannada movie, but I think that drawing of Brendan Fraser is too funny to not post. I have a few more poster photos on Flickr, though, if you’d like to see more.

A couple months ago one of my friends let me tag along to watch part of a shoot for a Tamil movie her friend was starring in (!). We drove down to an aircraft hangar in Tamil Nadu that was serving as a standin for a Sri Lankin airport and the site of the climactic battle scene of the movie. Actually, I have little idea what was going on, but there was a satisfying amount of fake blood, a lead pipe used as a weapon and lots of compressed air creating suitably dramatic hair. A lot of the fighting was done with both parties standing about ten feet apart and pretending to hit each other, with camera angles hiding the distance between them.

Here are my mother and I as reflected in the world’s largest silver object. Actually there is a pair–two gigantic urns in the City Palace in Jaipur, Rajasthan. You can see a little sliver of the second one behind both of us. The maharajah used them to carry water from the Ganges to England when he traveled there at the beginning of the 18th century. (That was the only water he used while there, if I was told the story correctly, I think to maintain his royal purity or something like that.)

The royal family of Jaipur still lives in part of the palace, and then tourists troop through the rest all day. There are lots of little museum-y bits. The thing I most regret not being able to take a photo of was the set of punch daggers with attached pistols in the (incredibly well stocked) armory. Absolutely something a 12-year-old boy would invent, and not something I can imagine a person actually using.